Research conducted in the United States and in other first world countries as shown that materials do not translate to satisfaction or happiness. The more material; goods an individual has does not equivalate to their happiness. In fact, people with more material goods were found to be less happy. In the public eye, people’s worth is not judged by their knowledge, kindness or wisdom but on how much stuff they possess. Since this is how pop culture views others, this is how we start to view ourselves. We judge our self worth based on what things we possess; whether we have the latest and the greatest. And since there will always be someone with something we want or someone that we see as “better” based on their possessions, this causes eternal dissatisfaction with our lives. In our modern society, we turn to quantity instead of quality to measure worth of ourselves and others. A perfect example of this is social media.

Social media is among the leading causes of materialistic mindsets among youth. Not only does the advertising that we see on a daily basis play a role, but we have equated our self worth and the worth of others to quantitative data. All popular social media outlets have a way of displaying the popularity of a certain post. For Twitter it is “Retweets” and “favorites,” for Instagram and Facebook it is “Likes.” These numbers play a huge role in how we evaluate self worth and the worth of others. We post for the purpose of getting these numbers and we want high ones. Whether it’s on a selfie or an awareness post, the higher numbers, the better. So why is this? When did we stop judging our self worth based on our behavior towards ourself and others? We are beginning to equate the value of interactions on the internet to those in person, giving the amount of Retweets or likes we receive a measure of our worth. Therefor the more we receive, the better our self esteem is because we can think of ourselves as popular. A study conducted by The University of Pittsburgh and the Columbia Business School showed that social media has a tie to a decreases of self control. Also, people with strong ties to their facebook friends had higher self esteem than those that did not. So, those that used the site to constantly keep in touch with friends felt better about themselves as individuals. Instead of caring about and maintaining meaningful relationships, we leave it up to social media to keep these relationships and rationalize it as staying “connected.” In order to show affection, we comment heart eye emojis on friend’s selfies or we “flirt” by favoriting all your crushes tweets or avoid confrontation by “subtweeting.” All of this can relate back to the materialistic nature of the younger generations.

The obvious source of materialism from social media is the countless advertisements we see every time we log on. Besides the advertisements, social media is just another way we can accumulate meaningless things that make us feel like we are worth more. Just like material things that we would shop for, these likes and retweets represent empty things that we believe have value so we feel better about ourselves when we have a lot. The pressure of society to be the prettiest, funniest or most popular definitely has something to do with why our generation thinks so much different than previous ones. Since we have a lack of meaningful conversations or relationships, we have to prove ourselves to the world in whatever way we can. Social media has given us an outlet where we can hide behind a computer and edit our representation to others and tailor it to what we think other people like to see. This mindset will eventually be detrimental to society if the younger generations do not learn to have meaningful conversations or how to deal with the judgement of other in an environment where everything cannot be edited.